In the US we read less than 2% of the printed material we produce. Just look at the Sunday paper. The problem is the economic structure of businesses putting ads into the paper, who cares if we only read the funnies.
I wonder how many megawatt hours we could save by converting all of our incandescent bulbs to flourescent screw-ins, which BTW are more cost-effective because they last so damn long while using only a minute fraction of the energy?
Let's say there are 350 towns in MA each with 1000 homes (conservative avg) with 25 light bulbs (even more conservative).
13 watt CFL is equivalent to a 60 watt incandescent
18 watt CFL is equivalent to a 75 watt incandescent
27 watt CFL is equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent
30 watt CFL is equivalent to a 150 watt incandescent
We could save 498,750,000 watts of electricity by using compact "75w (18w)" flourescents instead of incandescents in Massachusetts alone, actually I believe since these estimates are low the figure would far exceed that.
Now apply this one metric to the continent, and add the 100 or so other things we could do at home, the car and the office that would provide a similar return on simple investment.
Like they say, we throw away more than other countries consume.